Hitachi Data Systems unveils new ANZ cloud division

Hitachi Data Systems has announced the creation of a dedicated cloud and service provider division in Australia and New Zealand, aimed at giving managed service providers (MSPs) a comprehensive services portfolio that allows them to differentiate themselves in this burgeoning market segment.

According to the wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, the cloud and service provider division brings together technical, architectural and sales experts who specialise in infrastructure, converged technologies and cloud delivery.

These experts come from across Hitachi Data Systems to deliver an end-to-end, integrated solution comprising hardware, software and services that service providers can use as the foundation of their cloud offering.

Delivered as a subscription model, the solution from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) allows partners to flex up and down to capitalise on the growing demand for near-shoring cloud services without the capital expense (capex) and management requirements of traditional infrastructure in their data centre.

As a result, they can serve their own enterprise and small-and-medium business (SMB) customers more efficiently, and go to market with a competitive service offering starting from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to more value added offerings such as backup as a service (BaaS), archive as a service (AaaS), and content as a service (CaaS).

“There is a powerful shift underway in the IT market to a utility computing model, as organisations increasingly want to control their investment in legacy networks, shift IT spend from capex to opex and allocate internal resources to more strategic projects," says Altay Ayyuce, director, cloud and service provider, Hitachi Data Systems ANZ.

"He adds that the timing is right to launch the cloud and service provider division as businesses are more comfortable with deploying applications in the cloud, and want to drastically reduce IT operation costs.

Hitachi Data Systems works with its partners in a number of different ways: forming joint sales teams with managed service providers, providing technology enablement to partners, creating specific cloud software alliances, and offering its own managed cloud services.

“With the launch of the cloud and service provider division we are in a position to leverage the technological innovation of Hitachi Data Systems in areas such as infrastructure management, and converged and content management," Ayyuce adds."We team these innovations with our extensive experience in delivering an enterprise-grade service catalogue with strict service level agreements (SLAs).

“This strategy enables Hitachi Data Systems to meet the needs of all our service provider partners and enables them to offer a unified approach to cloud services.”

Hitachi Data Systems already works with more than 20 service providers in Australia and New Zealand.